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The Road to Amber

November 10, 2008 – 4:38 pm

Amber Road Front End

You can take it with a grain of salt, if you wish, either because Sun is a RedMonk client or because I am most certainly not a storage analyst, but Amber Road is - to me - a very interesting bit of kit. Despite being storage.

While I’ve known many and count as friends a few storage analysts, it’s candidly not a technical area that I’ve historically had much interest in. Most of my experience as a systems integrator was north of the storage tiers, and even in those days I viewed the area as unnecessarily proprietary and arcane. Much like EAI at the time, storage was the province of highly specialized resources reselling and implementing highly specialized hardware. That did considerably less than the more standardized servers we built on top of, but were instead very good at a very few things.

As a software analyst, I always found it odd that storage bucked the trends towards commoditized hardware and software that had reshaped the server and software markets before it, because therein lay opportunity. Or so it seemed to me.

And while there are doubtless other storage entries that harbor similar ambitions of commoditizing a field of technology that has yet to (really) weather that storm, Sun’s just announced Amber Road gear is the first mainstream entry that I’m aware of.

The history of the project, if you’re interested in such things, is detailed by two of its primary authors, Bryan and Mike, in entries posted today. Ted and Tim, for their part, related their own personal experiences with and views of the project.

My own exposure to the software that was Fishworks (the software side of Amber Road, which stands for Fully Integrated Software and Hardware..er, works) came some time after the initial approval was given and the secret, startup-like space was procured. How long after is not immediately available, either because it was prior to my last email migration or because my invite over to the office was too secret for email. Or both.

Either way, I had been curious as to what the inventors of DTrace intended as a follow up act, and - surprise! - it involved DTrace. Also, ZFS. I didn’t expect the heavy Javascript on the front end, necessarily, though that made a lot more sense once I learned that the Firefox Javascript interpreter had been DTrace-d, creating Helpermonkey (which Bryan was kind enough to show off at RedMonkOne two years back).

What was truly surprising, to me, was that I found the project interesting. This was storage, after all; an area that I avoided at all costs. But this was a storage system that I could relate to, one that I wanted to talk about…but couldn’t, as I was on double secret probation. Until today, and the official launch of what, collectively, is unofficially referred to as Amber Road and officially as the (boring) Sun Storage 7000 series. As Bryan put it, now the story can be told.

I won’t detail here the product specifics, except to note the cool fish codenames (Iwashim Fugu, and Toro) that echo The Simpsons; first because I am not, you’ll recall, a storage analyst, and second because El Reg has the details for you here.

Instead, I’d rather talk about the three things that make Amber Road interesting to me.

Commoditization and Open Source

As mentioned above, I’ve always considered the storage market - like the networking market - kind of weird. Why should one portion of a hardware market be profoundly altered by the forces of commoditization and open source, while the boxes sitting right next to them remained immune.

The answer was, they shouldn’t. And won’t, frankly, whether or not Amber Road is successful. Both commodity hardware and open source were coming to the storage market sooner or later, and both have arrived in these appliances.

The hardware itself, with the possible exception of the Flash drives, is pretty basic fare. All I can say is: finally. Who hasn’t had enough of proprietary boards, backplanes and so on? Tying it all together, and potentially differentiating the offering, is the open source foundation, which includes DTrace (analytics and instrumentation) and ZFS (storage pooling).

I would have applauded the arrival of commodity gear and open source into the storage market in any event, but I happen to think that the combination in Amber Road is particularly compelling.

DTrace & ZFS

If you follow the operating system markets at all, you’ve undoubtedly heard of these two technologies; depending on your role, in fact, you may be tired of hearing about them. Be that as it may, however, the fact is that these two technologies, introduced in Solaris 10, have yet to be equaled by commercial alternatives. SystemTap, Linux’s alternative to DTrace, is not ready for prime time, and neither are Ext4 nor BTRFS - the Linux answers to ZFS.

But while the general purpose operating system selection process is about more than kernel observability and next generation filesystems, those two technologies in particular are put to good use in Sun’s new storage appliances.

DTrace is employed to provide some eye catching yet substantive analytics. If you can think of a question related to storage analytics, it’s probably in there somewhere: IOPS, protocols, clients, files, whatever you want to know, just ask. The information is available because of the visibility that DTrace has of running, production systems. Put differently, it’s leveraging the observability as a regular, mainstream production feature, rather than a mere debugging tool. Which is interesting, I think.

As is the usage of ZFS, which is employed as the binding agent for a number of distinct devices that have little in common. Until they form a hybrid storage pool, that is. Speaking of…

Hybrid Storage Pools

Flash is the new disk, I’ve heard it said more than once. But even with costs down 50-70% per annum, it’s still not economical - or wise, given the lack of history for the devices - to construct storage infrastructures purely from Flash and RAM. But to not leverage them at all, and to rely entirely on disks means that customers can’t realize any of the advantages Flash can offer. Far better, it would seem, to architect a product that leverages the strengths of both Flash and disk, while mitigating their respective weaknesses. Enter the hybrid storage pool.

As Adam discusses, and Mike and I talk about on a San Francisco street (replete with very loud buses), the so-called hybrid storage pool is a collection of RAM, Flash (in both read and write optimized varieties) and lower speed 7200 RPM disks pooled via the ZFS filesystem technology from Solaris.

When pooled this way, Sun argues that the resulting hybrid pool will be at least as performant as (if not faster than) alternatives, while consuming less power. And, of course, costing less money. While I’ll wait for both customer verification on some of these same claims, as well as some independent benchmarking, on paper the appliance seems to be the best of a couple of worlds.

What Does It All Mean?

We’ll see. Clearly, a new storage product by itself is not the cure for all that ails Sun.

But this is the most significant product launch I’ve seen from Sun in a long while, because it applies an open source set of technologies to a commodity base, creating a differentiated whole that is aimed at a market that hasn’t seen enough of either commoditization or open source. All of which is good, if you’re Sun.

The primary question for me, however, is not whether these products will find a market, but rather how quickly, and which one? Storage, after all, is a strange market. In my experience with storage procurement, it’s a strategic play in a way that even servers might not be. Workloads can be migrated, particularly with the advent of live migration virtualization technologies. But hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of data are a different matter; they can’t be easily or quickly moved, they must be protected both in place and in transit, and they need to be accessible.

Meaning that at least initially, I expect Sun’s appliances to perform better in greenfield than in consolidation or swapout scenarios. But when wasn’t that the case with technology?

The ultimate reality of this market to me, however, recession or no recession, is that data volumes are expanding exponentially. And once the telemetry wave kicks in, in both the consumer and enterprise spaces, we’re all going to need more storage. With Amber Road, Sun is much better positioned to take advantage of that than they were prior to its introduction. How much better is now in the hands of the sales team, as the engineering side seems to have done their job well, from where I sit. According to the Journal, Forrester disagrees.

I guess we’ll see who’s right. Either way, it’s nice to - finally - be able to talk about this publicly. Been a long time coming.

P.S. Oh, and one last note: I’m not sure whose idea it was to provide a VMware image of the appliance, but that was much appreciated. The registration process is still a pain in the ass, but being able to fire up an appliance and see the analytics pieces firsthand in VMware Player was nice.

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IBM’s IOD Conference: Reactions

November 9, 2008 – 9:02 pm

True, IBM’s Information On Demand conference is two weeks in the past, but better late than never, as they say.

The conference, of relatively recent vintage, is the annual gathering of customers, partners and others investing in IBM’s information management (database et al) platforms. And in a conference climate that’s seeing $120 rates at upscale San Francisco hotels, IOD seemed reasonably full. It’s grown pretty quickly for a venue that’s only a few years old; quickly enough that Vegas, sadly, is the venue of choice.

For those that were either unaware of the conference or unable to attend, a few quick themes and reactions.

Real Time

Real time information has been the promise of projects as long - longer, actually - as I’ve been in this business. At no time, however, has it been more in demand than at present, when a difference in real time and near real time information can mean a quantitative difference in lives or returns, depending on whether we’re talking about defense, healthcare or the financial sector. Anyone care to bet that real-time compliance isn’t going to be an in demand application following the near complete collapse of our banking system?

It comes as no surprise, then, that real time was a common theme in IOD presentations. But it goes beyond clever marketing, as some of the efforts of the stream research project - funded in part by unnameable government agencies for several years - surface in production systems.

The Stream technologies are reportedly sophisticated enough to process not just text in real time, but audio or video. Which I found impressive. I haven’t spoken to any of the people using this stuff yet, so it’s unclear to me how practical/scalable/etc this technology is outside of a few high margin deployments, but it’s definitely something I’ll be keeping an eye on.

Telemetry

Along with real time, and presumably tied to their Smart Planet initiative, telemetry was a key theme of not just the IBMers at the show, but the customers and partners I spoke with.

And why not? Even on a personal level, each of us is generating massive amounts of telemetry each day. From the obvious email records, to burgeoning monitoring of everything from money (Mint) to music (Last.fm) to travel (Dopplr) to location enabled home monitoring services (see this Android example), telemetry is increasingly important. More important is the ability to process it and act on it.

Which is where IBM spent a lot of focus - the process by which telemetry is consumed and information is returned.

Cloud

Unique for the conferences I’ve attended recently, IOD featured a minimum of discussion around cloud related initiatives. Part of this, presumably, is IBM’s lack of an offering in the cloud data management space, but it’s also related, I suspect, to the size of some of the information stores discussed at the show. While I remain as bullish as ever on the opportunity afforded by the cloud, the challenges of large scale datasets present some significant challenges to the paradigm. One cloud customer I spoke this week has a 6 plus petabyte database; by my back of the envelope calculations, if that was uploaded at the speeds afforded by my home DSL connection, the transfer would conclude sometime around never.

Still, the lack of cloud discussion was notable, for even if IBM’s traditional customer set and traditional workloads don’t lend themselves perfectly to cloud environments, it’s being targeted by many vendors as a massive greenfield opportunity.

Much like that that fueled the original growth of MySQL, in fact.

Economics

As is typical in these economic Last Days, there were a great many questions put to IBM about the economy, their exposure to its challenges, and the outlook for the business. The answer, as perhaps could have been anticipated, was that while the economic outlook would undeniably present challenges to IBM and its ability to execute, they were comfortable with their position because of both their ability to weather previous economic storms and the increased relevance of their product lines to customers that would be looking to extract ever more value from their data.

Marketing & Jargon: The Good and the Bad

When it comes to their marketing efforts, the good news is that IBM is largely speaking the language of its traditional customer set. The standard large enterprise that does business with IBM has a seemingly endless appetite for the jargon that IBM happily serves up, with phrases like “Better Business Outcomes,” “End-to-end Capabilities,” and “Business Optimization Growth” growth dominating their marketing materials.

And to IBM’s credit, in addition to speaking a language that its customers seem to understand, the examples are heavy on customer and industry case studies, so there is some grounding. Which is the good.

But still, it’s all Greek to me - and I’m an analyst. These are a set of phrases I cribbed verbatim from a single presentation at the IOD conference:

  • optimized business process capabilities
  • innovation for growth
  • business optimization era
  • unlocking the business value of information
  • new value that you would create though business optimization and transformation

What does any of that actually mean? To me, to you, or to a potential customer? IBM marketing, business focused as it typically is, has long tended to the abstract, but in certain cases it’s crossed the line into consultant bingo. Which suits a certain class of enterprise customer nicely, but is generally incomprehensible to anyone else.

It would be nice, in future, to see more concrete, less abstract presentations from the IBM Information Management folks, because one of the keys to marketing these technologies is making them real, and abstraction does not serve that cause. Quite the contrary.

Disclosure: IBM is a RedMonk customer, and comped hotel costs for this conference.

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November 7, 2008 – 6:04 pm

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The Friday Grab Bag: iPhone Headsets, Voting, and, Yes, The Election

November 7, 2008 – 6:46 am

wherein the zipcar promises...death

Another interesting week in the books. Sunday, I watched my little brother running the New York Marathon. Thursday, my ZipCar threatened to kill me. In between, there was a conference, two full day client gigs, multiple whole meals of food with colleagues and friends, and 15 hours or so hours of my life that I’ll never get back blown on planes.

Oh, and there was that election business.

All of which might help explain why things have been a little quiet around here. But not to worry, there’s a bunch in the hopper. Conference recaps, product launches, and so on. Good thing I’ve decided not to return to San Francisco next week.

In the meantime, it’s Friday, so you’ll get your usual grab bag of items that aren’t getting their own entries. Enjoy. Or suffer, as the case may be.

Apple’s iPhone Headset

With my v-moda earphones broken for the third time, I was forced to fall back this week on my auxiliary pair - the default iPhone headset. Which is, frankly, awful. I don’t mean the sound, as I’m not enough of an audiophile to tell the difference, but the comfort. Apple makes wonderfully designed products in the iPod and iPhone and then pairs them with consistently uncomfortable headsets. Which delights their aftermarket suppliers, I’m sure, but seems to shaft customers.

Anyway, after the iPhone headset cut the inside of my ear this week after the rubberized edge coating peeled off, I relented and purchased a pair of Etymotic HF2’s. I like them so far, though they are not as comfortable as the v-moda’s and are more expensive by almost half. The hope is that they are more reliable, then, by half. We’ll see.

Fivethirtyeight.com

You might remember that I’ve been arguing on behalf of Fivethirtyeight’s statistical modeling and projection of this election. How did they do? They pretty much nailed it, as many others have noticed. Expect similar statistical analyses to become a fundamental portion of all future political coverage.

How I Voted

This is not a story about the election. Nor is it a story about who won, how it was won, or how I feel about who won and how they won. That comes later.

It is, instead, a story about a single public servant that took it upon herself to ensure that I was able to cast my ballot in the most important election of my lifetime.

Here’s what happened:

  • October 2nd, I requested an absentee ballot from Colorado - my official state of residence, even now.
  • October 29th, my ballot still not having arrived, I visited the polling stations while passing through Denver to inquire as to its status or simply vote, if possible. I was told that the ballot had been mailed on the 24th, and that if it still hadn’t arrived, I was to call the office.
  • October 31st, I returned to Maine to find that the ballot still had not arrived.
  • November 1st, still no ballot. And I’m flying out the next morning, a Sunday, not to return until well after the election.
  • November 3rd, I contact the office, and am first told that I cannot be helped, because emergency fax ballots are only made available to those overseas. Later, after it’s determined that the Denver electoral office mailed my absentee ballot to my Denver address - defeating the purpose of the absentee ballot - they relent, and agree to provide me with a fax ballot. I receive a fax application for an emergency ballot, and return it to the Denver office at 12:45 PM MT. No ballot arrives that day.
  • November 4th, Election Day, and still no ballot. I called the electoral office, and was by a twist of fate connected to the most helpful public servant in the history of public servants, one Angela Lawson. She assured me that she would check with my county clerk and then call me back. I was not hopeful. Five minutes later, my phone rang, and Angela informed me that Sheila - the county clerk - was working on it, and that I should expect a ballot shortly.

    Hours later, I’m still waiting on a ballot, and call Angela back. She promises to call me back, and does. They’re working on it over in the Denver county office. Shortly thereafter a fax ballot arrives. It’s borderline illegible, but it’s a ballot. I print it out, vote for the candidates that are important to me, and attempt to fax it back. And get a busy signal. And another. And so on, for twenty minutes.

    Call four (or five, who’s counting?) to Angela, who checks and provides me with a second fax number. Which also proves to be locked up. Angela calls the county, is assured that the fax machine in question is sitting idle, calls me, hears the busy signal from the fax machine, calls the county back and ultimately coordinates - live - a fax window from me. Which I take advantage of, and fax in my ballot. At which point Angela brightly thanks me for voting, wishes me a wonderful weekend, and hangs up.

Without Angela, it’s simple: my vote - insignificant though it proved to be - would not have been counted. If every public servant was as dedicated as Angela, I would have a lot more confidence in government run programs. So in the event that Angela reads this, thank you.

San Francisco Hotels

I’m not sure if it’s the economy, the season, or something less obvious, but the rates for San Francisco hotels have rarely been lower, in my experience. This week I got ~$120 rates from both the Hotel Monaco (a Kimpton property) and the Westin on Market. Neither are the St. Regis, of course, but they are generally relatively pricey, so the rates were a real surprise.

The Crumpler

Many of you know that I’ve replaced my worn out Patagonia One Bag - which I loved - with a new Crumpler Part and Parcel. So far, so good on that front. I’ll have a more detailed review later, but while there are a few things I’m still getting used to - the lack of any outside pockets, the lack of an external handle - it’s a fine bag.

The Election

I have always sought to keep politics out of this space, and I will not break that tradition here. I will say, however, that Tuesday’s election made me very proud of my country. Unlike what some would argue, believing that this nation is imperfect is not anti-American, but at once realistic and necessary. And whether you agree with his politics or not, the fact that this country elected Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States is a profound sign of progress in area in which this country’s history has been, frankly, shameful. It’s not victory, but it’s undeniably progress.

As Senator McCain graciously acknowledged in his concession speech, the election of Obama is a reminder that in this country - more so, we like to believe, than in any other - your station, your worth, and your future does not have to be dictated by the color of your skin.

If only for that reason alone, Tuesday night was a moment in time that I am sure that I will remember for the rest of my life.

Proudly.

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Farewell, Mr. Hillerman

November 3, 2008 – 12:26 am

It would be more than presumptuous for me to eulogize an author of Tony Hillerman’s stature, so I promise not to try. Still, I will miss him and his work.

Many of you have heard me disparage the quality of literature commonly found at airports, but Hillerman - whose work was popular enough to appear in them - is one of the exceptions to the rule.

It’s not that he was James Joyce writing mystery novels; he was not, and from what I’ve read about the man, he’d probably be the first to point that out. But apart from crafting himself a very successful career writing about “all that Indian stuff” his first agent advised him to excise, he - like another of my favorites, John D. MacDonald - transcended the genre with some real strengths as a writer.

The most obvious, and most celebrated, is the aforementioned subject matter. Hillerman would ultimately prove to be a far better judge of the public’s appetite for intelligently served observations about a variety of Native American cultures and their contrast with our “American” perspective. Where his agent believed them, apparently, to be a distraction, they ultimately were highly differentiating. At least for this reader.

Hillerman’s novels - mystery novels, even - made the histories of the Navajo, primarily, but to a lesser extent the Anasazi, Hopi, Zuni, Utes and other peoples sufficiently interesting to compel outside research. The resulting lessons were as painful as they were utterly unsurprising. Growing up, I can recall reading a book that my Dad had had when he was a child - a sort of Davy Crockett-style, fictionalized history of the frontiersman Kit Carson. Given that the book in question was probably authored in the early part of the twentieth century, I’m sure you can guess as to whether Carson played the hero or villain. The Navajo perspective, as related by Hillerman, was quite different from what I’d read. And after reading the history of the Long Walk, it’s easy to understand why.

Nor was it just the historical aspects that were compelling: I found - and still find - the Navajo philosophies on a great many things surprisingly well aligned with my own. As my friends and family are, frankly, tired of hearing about. Particularly the one regarding the differing cultural values with respect to interpersonal silence - that one never goes over well.

But although Hillerman was clearly sympathetic to the Native American cause, he was no apologist. I appreciate and recommend his work not because they serviced a naive and utopian view of the cultures of peoples such as the Navajo, but rather because they emphatically did not. Hillerman showed instead a deft touch for exploring the differing values without lapsing into cliche or becoming preachy - a significant challenge indeed. But from the perspective of one who knew little about the subject matter before becoming acquainted with his work, his eye appears keen, the lessons well taken. For all that he seemed to admire the family first economics of the Navajo people, as an example, his stories constantly highlighted the intrinsic difficulties they imposed on a people that - for better or worse - has been integrated into a modern capitalist society.

Indeed, much of the case of characters in the novels could be considered to be cut from the same cloth as Carver’s blue collar lives of “quiet desperation.” And while Hillerman was no Carver, few if any writers have done a better, fairer job of telling the Native American side of the story. A side that has too often been lost, and will sadly be in further jeopardy with his passing.

Besides the unwittingly educational nature of the novels, however, I’ll miss the characters, who will presumably follow Hillerman to wherever he’s now headed. Where someone reading a Tom Clancy novel might reasonably ask why he bothered putting people in the story at all, so much of an afterthought and cardboard cutouts of people did they seem, I often had the opposite reaction when reading Hillerman’s novels. The plot, cunningly crafted though it might be, became little more than a backdrop against which the lives of the characters - never easy or simple - would play out. In many respects, they embodied the tension that suffused Hillerman’s work: where Leaphorn was raised traditionally but had grown distant from his people’s teachings, the younger foil in Chee was struggling to maintain his heritage and religion in a world with less and less room for it.

Thus I lament the passing of another one of my favorite authors, and encourage you - if you haven’t yet had the pleasure - to pick up one of his books. The bad news is that there will be no more now. But the good news is that if you like them, there are quite a few in front of you.

So enjoy, and in the meantime, let me express my sincere condolences to the Hillerman family. I have always been, and will remain, a big fan.

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FORZA AZURE

October 31, 2008 – 2:26 pm

This week at is PDC event, Microsoft, as I’m sure you’ve heard (you heard it here last), announced their long planned entry into the cloud computing space. Called Azure, it represents Microsoft’s answer to competitive cloud platforms from the likes of Amazon, Google, and others.

This was a critical product, because to date the cloud has been - EC2 alphas of Solaris and Windows aside - exclusively Linux. Which was a situation less than desirable for Microsoft. Because though we might reasonably debate just relevant cloud platforms will be to enterprises, it would be tough to argue the assertion that they are important. Critically so. Which is why you’re seeing virtually every major vendor on the planet - Microsoft obviously now included - scramble for their own cloud vision.

Thus far, these visions are almost surprisingly unique in their differentiation; few of the offerings are of the “me too” variety, which is positive from a customer choice perspective if potentially negative from a customer substituability and lock-in standpoint.

Azure is no exception to this trend, as is manifests Windows in a cloud format distinct from the Windows cloud implementations enabled by Amazon or VMware. To explore why, let’s go to the Q&A.

Q: To begin with, are there any disclosures to make?
A: Yes. Microsoft is a RedMonk customer, as are other vendors with cloud ambitions or offerings such as Cloudera, Dell, EnterpriseDB, IBM, Red Hat, Sun, and so on. The full list of RedMonk clients is available here.

Q: For those readers that may not have read the news in detail, can you summarize the nature of the offering?
A: Certainly. Azure is a base platform with several available service components layered on top of it, that can be consumed in an ad hoc fashion. Specifically these service components are: Live Services (incl. “Mesh”), .NET Services (ACL, workflow, service bus, etc), SQL Services (a query engine), Office Sharepoint Services, and Microsoft Dynamic CRM Services. Last, there is a layer of directly available, discrete applications rather than building blocks (Sharepoint Online, Exchange Online, etc). These are built upon Azure, a unique and not generally available flavor of Windows that was designed for the custom datacenters that Microsoft has constructed.

The occasionally awkward naming aside, these services offer developers and ISVs the fundamental building blocks necessary for constructing applications.

Q: Ok, so there are a lot of cloud offerings: how does this compare to the current slate?
A: It is highly differentiated from Amazon’s EC2/S3 paradigm, which preserves in the cloud traditional notions of machine instances and so on. In terms of the development style it compels, it is most similar to Force.com or Google’s App Engine, both of which eschew the instance in favor of a fabric. Rather than plan for capacity using machine instance metrics, fabric cloud developers simply deploy to the platform, which - in return for the user surrendering substantial control - assumes the burden of scaling.

As was the case with Google App Engine, there will undoubtedly be much debate on whether this is a good or a bad thing for developers: while the removal of scaling concerns eases their responsibilities slightly, it also introduces a learned helplessness.

But irrespective of the debate, the model that Azure follows is one increasingly popular in the cloud.

Q: Is Azure innovative?
A: Well, as Steve Mills said at a recent IBM conference, to some extent none of the cloud platforms are precisely innovative, since many of the concepts have been with us for decades - services bureaus was his example. And to some extent, Microsoft is a follower in this market, with Amazon - by Ozzie’s own admission, being for a time the only one perceiving and attacking this market - the early pioneer, followed by Google, Saleforce.com and others.

That said, the level of cloud to local IDE integration that Microsoft has been able to achieve is impressive, and signficantly differentiating at present.

Q: How so?
A: Well, first we have to look at the existing landscape of cloud development and deployment tools. Which, frankly, aren’t good. The development experience that I’ve sampled from Amazon and App Engine is inconsistent, and frequently underdocumented. Nor are there seamless integrations back to development tools, which is why we’re starting conversations in that direction.

Put bluntly, it could be said that today’s cloud platforms are succeeding in spite of their tooling, rather than because of them.

Against this backdrop, then, it’s nothing but logical that Microsoft would leverage its development strength and position - Visual Studio having set for years, in my opinion, the development tooling benchmark. Still, their execution in Azure - at least from the briefing and demo that I’ve received, is impressive.

Unique to the marketplace - at least as far as I’m aware - Microsoft will offer the developers to build against a local version of the cloud. It will obviously be more resource limited than the real thing, but building locally and deploying remotely will significantly shorten the development cycle. Even better for Microsoft developers, Visual Studio users will literally be able to right click components and deploy them to Azure. Even better, as Sam discusses, there are POCs extant detailing construction with Eclipse and deployment to Azure.

All in all, I expect the development experience to be one of, if not the biggest, draws for Azure.

Q: What is Microsoft’s credibility like vis a vis cloud platforms, and scaling them successfully?
A: That’s unclear at present. The market perception is mixed, because Microsoft’s Live properties - most notably search - underperform their competition significantly in traffic metrics. The question is, as it was put to me by a developer this week, is whether or not building and hosting datacenters is or will soon become a Microsoft core competency.

Q: And what would Microsoft’s answer to that be?
A: They would presumably begin with some of the Live numbers. In the deck they presented to me, they said they see the following volumes for their hosted offerings: Live Search queries (2B/mo), MSN page views (10B/month), Live ID authentications (30B/mo), Messenger messages (240B/mo). How those compare to, say, Google is - at least to me - unknown. But they are sufficiently big numbers to quell the basic doubt.

But more relevant, perhaps, is the volume of the investment in datacenters. They’re going up fast, and each is a half a billion dollars. During our briefing, it was also mentioned that the hardware deployed is actually unique, with customized and proprietary board designs built in partnership with AMD involved.

None of the above guarantees competence in scaling the services and keeping them available, of course, but it does indicate commitment to those ends.

Q: What is the pricing of the offerings?
A: The specifics were not made available to me, and I don’t believe are known at the present time. In dicussing the models, however, Microsoft stated their intent to keep things simple, and accessible, with even free, ad supported models potentially available. But we won’t know how this compares until the pricing is disclosed, and it will be interesting to see how aggressive Microsoft is. Both as an indication of how elastic they think the demand is for their cloud offering, as well as their confidence in same.

Q: How compelling is the platform to non-MSFT developers? What about web standards and open languages?
A: Well, the CLR implemenations of dynamic languages aside (while interesting and useful, these are not mainstream in the way that, say, PHP is), the offering is predictably Microsoft centric. Thus the platform is a natural fit for Microsoft developers, and a somewhat unnatural one for everyone else.

That said, the service is very REST friendly. As Microsoft’s Jon Udell says:

Note also that you don’t have to use any Microsoft technologies to work with these Azure services. The demo program used LINQ, WCF, and — for the Live Mesh stuff — a wrapper library that packages the API for use by .NET software. But any technology for shredding XML and communicating over HTTP will work just fine.

Which is good news not only for Microsoft customers, but those who will be compelled for whatever the reason to work against Azure applications and stores.

Do I expect Azure to be an overwhelmingly compelling proposition for the non-Microsoft developer audience? In certain cases, perhaps, but not on a volume basis given the nature of the offering. But it will, at the very least, be interoperable.

Q: Aside from your assessment, who are the target audiences for the offering?
A: According to Lauren Cooney’s Q&A, the particular audiences anticipated are:

  • Large enterprises and ISVs who need to extend existing on-premises applications to the cloud to increase scalability, reliability, and interoperability while reducing costs and management overhead.
  • Web 2.0 developers and small ISVs who want to take advantage of a rich, highly versatile Web-based platform to build scalable, available applications for the web.
  • Hobbyists and students who want a platform that provides an easy way to start developing Web-based applications.

Personally, I think the above is a little optimistic, at least in the short term. Enterprises, for example, will need time to deconstruct and evaluate what is effectively a different development paradigm. Web 2.0 developers, meanwhile, are as a rule a.) heavily reliant on LAMP and b.) heavily reliant on Macs (which don’t run Visual Studio natively). And so on.

But in spite of that, Azure will find a large audience if only by virtue of Windows’ massive market presence.

Q: How easy will be it for Microsoft developers to transition to Azure from current enviroments and vice versa?
Q: On the first point, reportedly not difficult. When I spoke with him, Mark Rogers said simply, “Any managed code that runs on .NET is welcome in our cloud.” While the translation to that environment will undoubtedly pose challenges, much as Amazon EC2 users have to learn the storage and persistence mechanisms unique to that offering, it’s probably that most .NET developers will have little difficulty leveraging Azure. One obvious example is the SQL Services offering: the terminology and design points are non-standard: databases rougly equate to “authorities” and tables to “containers.”

Extracting applications from it, however, to deploy locally is likely to prove challenging, not least because the learned helplessness mentioned above.

Q: When is Azure going to be generally available?
A: The launch date is to be announced at MIX in Q2 of 09, with commercial availability targeted for the following quarter.

Q: What is your ultimate view of Azure, then, of what it means to the cloud landscape?
A: Microsoft’s entry, while imperfect, is highly credible, and particularly in the development experience, ups the bar significantly. Which, in my view, is great news for customers, because there’s nothing like competition to keep you moving. Much of the success or failure of Azure will be a function of pricing and models, but as presently constituted it is effectively guaranteed an audience as few other vendors are. As such, I’m with Dion when he says that Azure is “a wake up call to Adobe, Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, IBM, Sun, [insert other developer / platform players] to get kicking.”

Competition is a wonderful thing. And not just for us analysts.

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By sogrady | Posted in Cloud | 5 Comments

Get Thee Offline, Firefox

October 30, 2008 – 8:59 pm

offline

Because it’s partially responsible for the delay on pieces concerning the IBM conference and Microsoft’s Azure launch, I thought I would take a second to detail more precisely today’s criticism of Firefox’s offline paradigm. Clearly I’m explaining myself poorly, because David’s a smart guy and even he couldn’t parse my terse, 140 character explanation. And I might as well comment, as the Mozilla guys have been politely interested in feedback on the subject in the past, even when responding to a comment like “Mozilla’s browser is still fairly stupid when offline.”

So, here’s what I would have from Firefox: on startup, in an offline setting, do nothing more than render my previous sessions tabs from the cache. That’s it. Let me, for example, open a bunch of tabs I need to finish an entry on Azure on the plane, and recover those later even when cold restarting the browser lacking a network connection. Put more bluntly, do not serve me a browser full of tabs that look like the above.

One of the problems in this space, I think, is the tendency to overthink the problem. Those of us who spend a significant amount of our day using offline applications have long craved a browser that would allow those web based apps to function offline. That, in part, is why so many of us were excited about Gears.

But a year later, the available evidence would indicate that persisting web based applications offline is just what developers told me it would be: exceedingly hard.

Not for a lack of tools, of course. Gears, or even Derby/JavaDB or native SQLite, offer much of the raw functionality a developer might require to allow an application to function in an offline context. But how to subset the data?

Neither traditional rich client (mobile being a notable exception) nor web developers have a great deal of experience in designing applications that function with but a portion of the typical dataset. Rich clients typically rely on a server in the traditional client/server context, while SaaS applications live on the same network as the data, typically. So how do you, as an application developers, choose the data to persist to the client for offline usage? And worse, how do you handle questions of synchronization, and the inevitable collisions between conflicting updates?

Gears has been out for about a year and a half now, and it’s still exceedingly rare amongst mainstream web applications. Even Google web applications; Reader has an implementation, clunky though it may be, while Mail - a logical candidate if ever there was one - does not.

You may conclude what you wish from that observation, but to me it means simply that the technology is difficult to apply.

Which is why I am not calling for, as David Berlind put it, “Seamless persistence of browser-based applications.” That implies - to me - the ability to browse a web app locally, rather than just render a single cached page. Offline would be more than welcome, of course, but it’s hard, and things that are hard take a long time to build. In the interim, I’m asking for something pretty basic.

Much like collaboration vendors overshot simply group scheduling by focusing on what could not be done, so too have the browser developers, I think, by trying to deliver the once and future offline persistence mechanism. Which, if they could deliver it, would be game changing.

But while I’m not willing to bet on that outcome, I would be willing to bet that simply tasking the browser with the far less complicated job of preferening the rendering of a given tab with the content from its cache over the ugly “Offline Mode” page would dramatically improve the experience for millions of users.

Or at least those of us users that have to fly occasionally.

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By sogrady | Posted in browsers | 9 Comments